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Showing posts from January, 2015

Laboratory Data Deliverables

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Laboratory Data Deliverables "   Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."  -Alfred North Whitehead I may be dating myself, but when I started working in the environmental industry, the fax machine was just becoming standard office equipment. They were slow, used thermal paper that came on a roll, and you had to cut the paper into the right size yourself. The paper was difficult to work with as it wanted to roll back up on itself. When we needed results from a laboratory in a hurry, we would ask them to "fax it over." Otherwise, laboratory  reports were always printed on paper and mailed via US Postal service. Once the paper or fax reports were received, we would take the data and "maybe" put it into a table. We would have to re-type the data ourselves into whatever format we wanted it in. We didn't always do tables because I'm talking about a time before

Technological Unemployment

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Technological Unemployment "Technology... is a peculiar thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."  -C.P. Snow Wikipedia defines Technological U nemployment  as "unemployment primarily caused by  technological change , " or more accurately technological innovation. In industries were "technological unemployment" occurs, productivity and profitability tend to increase. We don't generally think of increased unemployment as causing increased productivity. Most "technological unemployment" tends to happen in industries and work scenarios that are easily automated like assembly and manufacturing. Think robots.   However, automation is occurring in more and more sectors not previously thought to be automatable. Fast food restaurants are starting to experiment with automation. I've personally seen robotic beverage machines. A machine that grabs the right size cup and fills